Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr trailer shows off its open world

The Caligari sector of the Segmentum Tempestus is a big, nasty place.

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr is an "open-world sandbox action-RPG" set in the Caligari sector of the Segmentum Tempestus, a vast tract of space "far from the light of Astronomican." The game will begin in one of the Caligari subsectors, which the latest trailer says will encompass more than a dozen systems with huge numbers of planets, and then expand from there into new, persistent subsectors.

As new subsectors are unlocked, the story will progress as well, driven by the actions of the community. That will mean hundreds of hours of gameplay, which developer NeoCore Games says will avoid repetitive grind through the combination of the open-world sandbox and randomized mission design. But there will also be "specifically tailored missions" which will form the backbone of the Grand Investigations, and a separate single-player campaign set in abandoned fortress monastery.

"From time to time we are going to launch so-called 'seasons,' which are free content patches, each with a very strong central theme," the trailer says. "A season will introduce new enemy types, new conflicts, new investigations that fill out the background of the season. Seasons will run for a certain amount of time, and then they will be resolved, depending on how the Inquisitors of the Caligari Conclave decide on certain matters."

It's a bit vague on the specifics, but sounds admirably ambitious. Randomized mission generation can be a crapshoot, but if NeoCore can keep the tailored and seasonal content interesting, it might have a winner on its hands. Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr was, when last we looked, slated to come out sometime this year. At this point, I don't think that's going to happen, and the new trailer says only that a playable alpha is coming soon. I've reached out to NeoCore for more information, and will update if and when I receive a reply.